The Jimmy Smits interview

It’s an urban legend that actor Blair Underwood based his “L.A. Law” role of a hotshot black attorney on Barack Obama during the late 1980s. Underwood had been playing the part for years before he even met Obama, who was president of the Harvard Law Review at the time. But it is true that Jimmy Smits’ charismatic candidate character Matt Santos on “The West Wing” was inspired directly by the politician. Indeed, writer-producer Eli Attie even spoke to Obama adviser David Axelrod to pick up back story and other details for use in his scripts.

The many parallels between “The West Wing’s” final season and the current presidential race have been widely noted. Like Obama, Santos is a former community organizer with a wife and two kids who enjoys grass-roots support, excels in soaring rhetoric about “hope,” yet lacks real congressional experience. His far older Republican rival, Arnie Vinick (Alan Alda), had a chilly relationship with conservatives in his own party and often engaged the press with “straight talk.” Indeed, “The West Wing” also predicted an October surprise of sorts, only it was a nuclear reactor meltdown instead of one on Wall Street that altered the race.

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Though the “West Wing” finale was more than two years ago and Smits moved on to a role as an assistant D.A. on the quirky cable drama “Dexter,” thoughts of Santos and his eerily prescient presidential quest still weigh on his mind. Less than a hundred hours before the election, Politico spoke with the actor, who had just returned from introducing Obama at a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., rally that capped off the candidate’s groundbreaking half-hour infomercial.

Politico: What went on behind the scenes in Fort Lauderdale?

Smits: It was an important night for them. Shock and awe in a way. They had the half-hour thing and the live show and earlier a get-out-the-vote rally. The senator was in conversation with President Clinton in the staging area, and I was just impressed with how ... calm everything was. That’s always my big perception about him — the steadiness there. Sure, there’s the magic of luck and the timing of things, but it’s how he keeps his head above the fray that makes me feel he can really be a transformative figure.